2021 was an incredible year for Cherre. Any way you look at it, we grew and flourished. We can’t begin to describe everything that happened this past year, but we’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on all the incredible things we’ve accomplished as a community.
There are many ways to measure accomplishments, but numbers are always the easiest. Last year we raised a $50M growth round and added Trustbridge, Glilot Capital, and Crow Holdings, among others, to our investor group. We were very excited at the time to have these incredible investors join our journey, and looking back, we couldn’t have been happier with our choices. We’re very fortunate to have such an incredibly passionate and hungry group of partners.
We expanded last year and grew ARR by ~265%, representing a ~230% growth in our client count. At the same time, we increased our partner network by a staggering 410% – representing a larger increase than we could have ever planned. We also expanded our team by 210% and added almost 50 new full-time employees. We’re still growing fast, and have a similar amount of open roles to fill.
Finally, and quite incredibly, we grew the AUM powered by Cherre to $1.6 Trillion! The largest asset managers in the world – across multiple verticals, asset classes, instruments, and world geographies – have chosen Cherre to help them organize and leverage their data for actionable insight. We’re extremely excited about this explosive growth, and look forward to adding even more value to our clients.
Another way to measure progress is through hitting key product roadmap milestones.
We began the year with the goal to empower our partners to easily share data with our clients that have been eager to try and consume value-add data. In late 2021, we launched our first Cherre Lightning Connections with a large number of both resell and conduit agreements to support this initiative. We also worked with our partners to launch unique datasets such as Trepp’s CRE Income Statement Aggregates data as a Lightning Connection. It’s been remarkable to see how fast this initiative is evolving and growing.
We upgraded our delivery mechanisms to support much larger data volumes and complexity, and are now able to support the most demanding client use cases. Since many of our clients consume data in external environments such as AWS, Azure, Excel, PowerBI, Snowflake, Salesforce, etc., we’ve continued to increase our integration capabilities to further provide more flexibility and control for our clients.
We knew there was an incredible opportunity to collaborate with industry experts to add value to the market and accelerate mutual adoption, so we formed relationships with top firms in the industry. We are excited to have added Lionpoint, CohnReznick, RealFoundation, and Google as channel partners, and we look forward to working closely with them to propel the industry forward.
Finally, we completed our Soc 2 Type 2 certification after previously completing Type 1 certification – further providing comfort to our clients that they can trust Cherre with their most critical operations.
Another way to measure success is to observe the impact we’ve had on the market.
It’s not obvious at first sight – especially to newcomers – but to the veterans or the astute, you’ve all seen the industry dialogue drastically change last year, and the strategy that Cherre has been championing has broadly taken hold. There’s a unanimous consensus that organizations need a unified and centralized data environment. That environment must be able to connect all existing financial and operational data for actionable and near-real-time reporting, analytics, and forecasting, as well as all market data that supports such activities. It also needs to incorporate new market and sub-market data for asset underwriting. The industry understands that this environment has to be secure, compliant, flexible, and transparent. It’s also clear that it needs to be able to scale across all dimensions like volume of data, number of data sets, complexity, speed, etc.
There’s a broad understanding of the incredible value that a unified data environment provides out of the box, and the industry sees the tremendous opportunity to build or sustain a competitive advantage. It’s clear that the market is planning for rapid growth. Investors are entering new markets, asset classes, and instruments at record pace, and are growing both organically and through acquisitions and partnerships – forcing them to rethink their growth strategy to handle this scale and complexity. Cherre solves this cardinal challenge for them and the market sees us as one of the leaders of this evolution.
There’s a lot of work to be done. Candidly, we’ve barely started. We’ve set out to deliver on a long roadmap and we’re excited about our continued progress. Over the next year we will focus on a few big things:
Partners: We will continue to build our partner community and further help them gain access to our client community to add value. We will grow our library of Lightning Connections, making it easier for customers to add more data. We are extremely appreciative of our partners for joining us on this journey, and our ongoing commitment to you is to create and increase value for you while adding value to our clients at the same time. The opportunity to grow here together is incredible.
Reporting & Analytics: We want to expand the ways in which customers can generate instant insights from their connected data. This will focus on two paths – more out-of-the-box BI and model offerings, and building complex integrations with existing and future data science environments. Our existing out-of-the-box BI environment, CoreExplore, already supports hundreds, maybe even thousands, of dashboards for almost any asset class, geography instrument, or strategy, but we want to add niche asset classes and better package this experience for our users. At the same time, we want to preserve the flexibility of CoreExplore such that clients can leverage the platform to ask any question they have from the data and gain instant answers. We want to expand dashboard customization, empowering clients to build new dashboards with extreme ease, reducing the dependency on Cherre and removing any limits on future growth.
Integration & Modeling: For our more “advanced” clients, we will offer more ways to integrate with existing environments. We already support the ability to export all your data into whichever environment you chose, but we will further support deep integrations with common platforms, as well as provide our own Cherre Data Lab to support your ability to build advanced models from the broader data universe. We will roll out ways for modeling partners to build and rapidly deploy models to our client base without having to gain direct access to client data. There’s a lot of opportunity here, and we look forward to sharing more about this later this year.
Onboarding: We are actively working on improving our onboarding experience. We are building a new sandbox environment in which clients and partners can connect and explore their data and immediately gain value from Cherre. This will support technical users looking to understand the data structure, usability, and flexibility, as well as business users seeking to gain immediate insight into the value of their connected data.
We have a lot to learn. 5+ years on this journey – and most of our executives have been around this block – and we’re still learning every day. Every day, we work with the largest vendors in the world to serve the most sophisticated clients in the world. We regularly learn new use cases, and discover new challenges and opportunities day-to-day. This is a journey we are on together with the industry, and our success is directly tied to theirs. We have a mission as well as a responsibility to continue to add value to the entire industry, and we have a lot more to learn in order to do that consistently. We look forward to this and we have no intention of slowing down.
We’d like to thank our clients for giving us the opportunity to add value. We know that this journey isn’t easy for you, and we’re extremely grateful to have the opportunity to work together and deliver incredible results. We don’t take it for granted, and are appreciative of your continued support. We’d like to thank our partners for continuing to work with us to add value for our mutual clients. We can do even more for the market, and we look forward to finding more ways to create value together. We’d like to thank our investors for providing endless support and confidence in our mission. It’s never easy, but we feel confident in our ability to deliver together.
Finally, we want to thank our incredible Cherre employee community. I can’t tell you how proud we are as a founding and management team to see how much you’ve grown and matured this last year. We’re in awe of what you’ve accomplished, and are beyond excited to see everything you’ll accomplish next year. We hope you continue to see Cherre as your home for many years. We aim to provide a place for you to grow personally and professionally while having the time of your life! We hope to always deliver on that promise in a very rewarding environment.
We’re growing at a record pace and have endless opportunities in front of us. Thank you all for an incredible year, and let’s have an amazing 2022 building together!
Ben and L.D.
Title quote by Arthur C. Nielsen
